Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: April 2018 Books 1 – 4 - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 13

CHAPTER FOUR

JAZZ COULDN’T SLEEP. Accustomed to a much more physically active existence, she wasn’t tired and at two in the morning she put the light back on and tried to read until hunger took over and consumed her. She knew she shouldn’t but she loved a slice of toast and a hot drink before bed and the longer she lay awake, the more all-consuming the craving became. Inevitably she got up, raising her brows at her appearance in the faded long tee shirt she wore to bed. No dressing gown, no slippers in her wardrobe but so what? If she was quiet she doubted if she would wake up the very correct Jenkins.

The stairs creaked and she didn’t like moving round in total darkness but a light could rouse someone likely to investigate. By touch she located the door at the back of the hall and through that a flight of stairs, which ran down into the basement area where she assumed the kitchen lay. Safely through that door, she put on lights and relaxed. The kitchen was as massive as a hotel kitchen and she padded about on the cold tiles, trying not to shiver. She located bread and the toaster and milk and then, wonder of wonders, some hot-chocolate powder to make her favourite night-time drink. Jazz was grateful she wasn’t like her aunt, who joked that she only had to look at a bar of chocolate to gain an inch on her hips.

Her toast ready, she sat down at the table to eat with appetite, eyes closing blissfully as she munched hot butter-laden toast, which was the first glimpse Vitale had of her as he strode barefoot through the door.

‘You can’t wander round here in the middle of the night!’ he began impatiently. ‘My security team wakened me.’

‘Your security... What?’ Jazz gasped, startled out of her life by the interruption and even more startled by the vision Vitale made bare-chested and barefoot, clad only in a pair of tight jeans. He was completely transformed by casual clothing, she conceded in awe.

Vitale groaned out loud. ‘The whole house is wired with very sensitive security equipment and I have a full team of bodyguards who monitor it.’

‘But I didn’t see anything and no alarm went off.’

‘It’s composed of invisible beams and it’s silent. As soon as the team established that it wasn’t an intrusion but a member of the household they contacted me, not wishing to frighten you.’

‘Well, I’m not frightened of you,’ she mumbled round a mouthful of toast that she was trying to masticate enough not to choke when she swallowed because, in reality, Vitale was delicious shorn of his shirt and her mouth had gone all dry.

He was a classic shape, all broad shoulders, rippling muscular torso sprinkled with dark curls of hair leading down into a vee at his hips and a flat, taut stomach. Clothed she could just about contrive to resist him, half-naked he was an intolerable lure to her eyes.

‘They saw you on camera, realised that you weren’t fully dressed and surmised that the sudden intrusion of a strange man could scare you.’

‘On camera?’ she repeated in horror, striving to recall if she had scratched or done anything inappropriate while she was in the kitchen, bracing her hands on the table top to rise to her feet and move away from it.

Vitale shifted lean dark hands upward in a soothing motion. ‘Relax, they’ve all been switched off. We’re not being monitored right now.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she framed tremulously, the perky tips of her nipples pushing against the tee shirt below Vitale’s riveted gaze. ‘I only got up to get something to eat.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Vitale assured her thickly, inwardly speculating on whether she was wearing anything at all below the nightshirt or whatever it was. ‘But for the future, I’ll show you a button you can press just to let security know someone’s wandering around the house and this won’t happen again.’

‘OK,’ Jazz muttered, still shaken up at the idea that she had been watched without her knowledge by strange men.

Vitale ran a surprisingly gentle hand down the side of her downturned face. ‘It’s not a problem. You haven’t done anything wrong,’ he murmured sibilantly, his accent catching along the edges of his dark, deep, masculine voice.

A shocking flare of heat rose up from the heart of her as he touched her face and Jazz threw her head back in mortification, her green eyes wide with diluted pupils.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Vitale framed hoarsely. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes... You always did. And I didn’t intend to say that, don’t know which random brain cell it came from.’

An overpowering need to smile tilted Jazz’s tense lips because he sounded so stressed and so confounded by his own words. Beautiful eyes, well, that was something, her first and probably only ever compliment from Vitale, who worked so hard at keeping his distance. But he had touched her first, she reminded herself with faint pride in what felt vaguely like an achievement. Her body was taut as a bowstring and breathing was a major challenge as she looked up into dark, smouldering golden intensity. Ditto, beautiful eyes, she labelled, but she didn’t really think women were supposed to say things like that to men so she kept quiet out of fear that he would laugh.

‘Troppa fantasia... I have too much imagination,’ Vitale breathed, being steadily ripped in two by the conflicting impulses yanking at him. He knew he should let her go and return to bed but he didn’t want to. He was ridiculously fascinated that, even in the middle of the night and fresh from her bed with tousled hair, she looked fantastic. And so very different from the women he was used to, women who went to bed in make-up and rose before him to put on another face to greet the dawn, and his awakening, plastic perfect, contrived, artificial, everything that Jazz was not. Jazz was real right down to her little naturally pink toenails and that trait was incredibly attractive to him. With Jazz what you saw was literally what you got and there were no pitfalls of strategy or seduction lined up to trip him.

‘I would never have thought it,’ Jazz almost whispered, so painfully conscious of his proximity that the little hairs were rising on the back of her neck. ‘You’re a banker.’

‘And I can’t have an imagination too?’ Vitale inserted with a sudden flashing smile of amusement that would have knocked for six the senses of a stronger woman than Jazz.

‘It’s unexpected,’ she mumbled uncertainly, all of a quiver in receipt of that mesmerising, almost boyish grin. ‘You always seem so serious.’

‘I don’t feel serious around you,’ Vitale admitted, tiring of looking down at her and getting a crick in his neck. In a sudden movement that took her very much by surprise, he bent, closed his hands to her tiny waist and lifted her up. He settled her down on the end of the table. He was incredibly, ferociously aroused but Jazz seemed curiously unaware of the chemistry between them, almost innocent. No way could she be that innocent, he told himself urgently, because he would never touch an innocent woman and he desperately needed to touch her. His lovers were always experienced women, who knew the score.

‘But then you never know what you’re feeling,’ Jazz quipped. ‘You’re not into self-analysis.’

‘How do you know that?’ Vitale demanded with a frown.

‘I see it in you,’ Jazz told him casually.

Vitale didn’t like the conversation, didn’t want to talk either. He spread his hands to either side of her triangular face and he tasted that alluring pink mouth with unashamed passion.

Jazz was afraid her heart was about to leap right out of her chest, her breathlessness as physical as her inability to think that close to him. She felt nebulously guilty, as if on some level her brain was striving to warn her that she was doing something wrong, but she absolutely refused to listen to that message when excitement was rushing like fire through her nerve endings. Her nipples tightened, her slender thighs pushing firmly together on the embarrassing dampness gathering at the apex of her legs.

‘Per l’amor di Dio...’ Vitale swore, fighting for control because he was already aching. ‘What do you do to me?’

‘What do I do to you?’ Jazz whispered, full of curiosity.

She excited the hell out of him but he was too experienced to let that salient fact drop from his lips. ‘You tempt me beyond my control,’ Vitale heard himself admit regardless and was shocked by the reality.

‘That’s all right,’ Jazz breezed, one hand smoothing up over a high cheekbone, the roughness of his stubbled jaw lending a brooding darkness to his lean, strong face in the dimly lit kitchen, her other hand tracing an exploring path up over the sweep of his long, smooth back. ‘Are you sure those cameras are all off?’ she framed, peering anxiously round the brightly lit kitchen.

‘All of them,’ Vitale stressed, but he strode back to the door to douse the strong overhead illumination, plunging them into a much more welcoming and more intimate space only softly lit by the lights below the cupboards.

Her hand slid back to his spine. His skin was hot, faintly damp but it was his eyes she was watching and thinking about, those beautiful black-fringed eyes singing a clear song of stress and bewilderment and the glorious liberating message that he wasn’t any more in charge of what was happening between them than she was.

‘I want you, bellezza mia,’ he growled all soft and rough, sending shimmying awareness right down her taut spine just as he reached down and lifted her tee shirt and whipped it off over her head.

Jazz loosed a startled yelp and almost whipped her hands up to cover her naked body, but in that same split second of dismay she asked herself if she wanted to be a virgin for ever and if she would ever have the chance to have such a skilled lover, as Vitale was almost certain to be, again. And the answer to both questions was no. He wasn’t going to want a shy woman, was he? And he had to know all the right moves to ensure the experience was good for her, hadn’t he?

‘You are so beautiful,’ Vitale almost crooned, his hands rising to cup her delicate little breasts, which were topped with taut rosy tips that he stroked appreciatively with his thumb.

And that fast, Jazz had no desire to either cover up or breathe because the fabulous joy and satisfaction of being deemed beautiful by Vitale overwhelmed her. In gratitude, she stretched up to find his mouth again for herself, nibbling at his lower lip, circling slowly with newly discovered sensuality while all the time he was stroking and rolling and squeezing the peaks of her breasts that she had never known could be so responsive to a man’s touch. Little fiery arrows were travelling down to the heart of her, making her hips shift and squirm on the table as the heat and tightness increased there. And then, with what felt like very little warning to her, a climax shot through her like an electric charge, making her cry out in surprise and pleasure.

‘And as responsive as my most erotic dream,’ Vitale husked, wrenching at the zip of his jeans.

A lean brown hand pried her legs apart while she was still in a sort of blissful cocoon of reaction. Vitale pulled her closer and tipped her back to facilitate his intentions. A long finger traced her entrance and eased inside. He uttered a hungry groan of appreciation because she was very wet and tight and then he froze. ‘I’ll have to take you upstairs to get a condom,’ he bit out in frustration.

‘I’m on birth control,’ Jazz muttered helpfully. ‘But are you...safe?’

‘Yes because I’ve never had sex without a condom,’ Vitale confided, but the temptation to try it without that barrier was huge. He tried to argue with himself but, poised between her legs, craving the welcome her slender, lithe body offered his raging arousal, he realised it was a lost battle for him before it even started.

With strong hands he eased her closer still and she felt him, hard and demanding against her most tender flesh, and both nerves and eagerness assailed her. Her whole body came alive with electrified longing as if that first redemptive taste of pleasure had ignited an unquenchable fire of need inside her. He sank into her by easy degrees, groaning something out loud in Italian as she buried her face against a satin-smooth brown shoulder, barely crediting she was making love with Vitale, every sense she possessed rioting with sensation, the very smell and taste of his skin thrilling her.

And then he slammed right to the heart of her and a stinging pain made her grit her teeth and jerk in reaction. Withdrawing a little, Vitale paused for an instant, pushing up her face and looking down at her with what appeared to be brazen incredulity, and she knew then that at the very least he suspected he had been her first lover and he wasn’t pleased. But she ignored that unwelcome suspicion and wriggled her hips with feminine encouragement, watching him react and groan with a newly learned sense of empowerment.

‘Don’t stop,’ she told him.

And for the very first time ever, Vitale did exactly as she told him. He sank deeper again, stretching the tender walls of her heated core with hungry thoroughness and, that instant of pain forgotten, Jazz craved his contact. He gave her more, picking up speed, hard and fast until he was pounding into her and her excitement climbed with his every fluid, forceful thrust. It was much wilder and infinitely more uninhibited than she had dimly expected from a man as reserved as Vitale; indeed it was passionately explosive. She reached another climax and her body convulsed around his, the whole world, it seemed, erupting around her as he shot her into a deeply erotic and exhilarating release. A faint ache pulled at her as he withdrew and zipped his jeans.

‘Diavolo!’ Vitale exclaimed, stepping back from her while she fumbled for her tee shirt and hurriedly pulled it on over her head with hands that felt clumsy and unable to do her bidding. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?’

Fixing her face to a determined blank, Jazz slid off the table, only just resisting a revealing moan as discomfort travelled through her lower body. ‘We’re not having a post-mortem,’ she parried sharply, mortification engulfing her in an unanticipated tide that threatened to drown her. ‘You’re not entitled to ask nosy questions.’

She had had sex on a kitchen table with Vitale and she couldn’t quite believe it but she certainly knew she didn’t intend to linger to discuss it!

For a split second of frustration, Vitale wanted to strangle her. Her hectically flushed face was mutinous and furious and she was pointedly avoiding looking at him, which annoyed the hell out of him even though he didn’t understand why. After all, he didn’t want a post-mortem either, didn’t have a clue why or how what they had just done had happened and could think of at least ten good reasons why it shouldn’t have happened.

He watched her limp across the tiled floor as if she had had a run-in with a bus instead of her first experience of sex and he felt hellishly guilty and responsible. He experienced a sudden, even more startling desire to scoop her up and sink her into a warm reviving bath...and then have sex with her again? As if that were likely to improve anything, he reflected sardonically, raking unsteady fingers through his tousled black hair. What the hell was wrong with him? His brain was all over the place and he couldn’t think straight but he knew he had just enjoyed the best sex of his life and that was downright terrifying...

* * *

Jazz had informed Vitale that there would be no post-mortem but, seated in a bath at three in the morning, Jazz was unhappily engaged in staging her own. Had she actually thought of what they had done as ‘making love’? Yes, she had and she was so ashamed of herself for that fanciful label because she really wasn’t that naïve. It had been sex, pure and simple, and she knew the difference because she wasn’t a dreamy teenager any longer, she was an adult. Or supposed to be, she thought with tears stinging the backs of her eyes and regret digging wires of steel through her shrinking body.

Of course, they would both pretend it hadn’t happened...a moment of madness, the mistake swiftly buried and forgotten. After all, this was Vitale she was dealing with and he wasn’t going to want to talk about it either. On that front, therefore, she was safe, she assured herself soothingly. It was his fault in any case—he had had no business parading around half-naked in jeans and tempting her into that insanity. She hugged her knees in the warm water and sighed. She had done a stupid, stupid thing and now she had to live with it and with Vitale for weeks and weeks, being all polite and standoffish, lest he think she was up for a repeat encounter. Running away or hiding wasn’t an option.

A knock sounded lightly on the door and she almost reared out of the bath in her horror because she abruptly appreciated that Vitale was not running true to form. In a blind panic she snatched at a towel and wrapped it round her, opening the door the merest chink to say discouragingly, ‘Yes?’

Vitale discovered that he was immediately possessed by an impossibly strong urge to smash the door down and he gritted his teeth on yet another unfamiliar prompting to act unreasonably and violently. ‘Will you please come out? You have been in there for ages.’

From that point he wasn’t the only individual valiantly gritting teeth. Her flushed face frozen as he had never seen it before, Jazz emerged from the bathroom, noting that he had put on a black shirt. ‘I didn’t know you were waiting,’ she said dulcetly, leaning heavily on her one and only elocution lesson.

‘Look, don’t go all girlie on me. I don’t expect that from you,’ Vitale countered crushingly. ‘I only want the answer to one question.’

Jazz tried to unfreeze a little and look normal, or as normal as she could feel being confronted by Vitale when she was wearing only a towel. ‘OK.’

‘Why is a virgin on birth control?’ he asked gravely.

‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business. It was for...well, medical reasons,’ she told him obliquely, unwilling to discuss her menstrual cycle with him, her colour heightening until she felt like a beetroot being roasted and wanted to slap him for it.

‘It will be very much my business if you get pregnant,’ Vitale breathed witheringly.

‘It’s so like you to look on the dark side and expect the very worst,’ Jazz replied equally witheringly. ‘It’s not going to happen, Vitale. Relax and go back to bed and please forget this ever happened for both our sakes.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Vitale wanted to rip off the towel and continue even though he knew she was in no condition to satisfy him again. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his brain. It was pretty much as if his body had developed an agenda all of its own and he couldn’t control it.

‘We just had a sleazy encounter on a kitchen table in the middle of the night. What do you think?’ Jazz enquired saccharine sweet.

Vitale was receiving a strong impression that anything he said would be taken down and held against him. Sleazy? That single descriptive word outraged him. He swung on his heel, his lean, powerful body taut, and left the room and just as quickly Jazz wanted to kick him for giving up on her so easily. Her thoughts were a turbulent sea of conflict and confusion and self-loathing, sending her seesawing from one extreme to the other. No sooner was he gone than she wanted him back and she flung off the towel and climbed into bed, hating herself. It was so typical of Vitale to worry about the fact that he hadn’t used contraception. Now he would be waiting on that axe to fall and that was a humiliating prospect, even though it also reminded her that she hadn’t yet taken her daily pill. She dug into her bag and took it before switching off the light.

What was done was done and it had been amazing, she thought ruefully, but it was better not to think about that imprudent sudden intimacy that had changed everything between them. Now she was no longer thinking about Vitale as the boy he had once been, but Vitale, very much a man in the present and that switch in outlook disturbed her, made her fear that somewhere deep down inside her there was still a tiny kernel of the fourteen-year-old who had believed the sun rose and set on Prince Vitale Castiglione...